Joshua Allen wrote:
>
>...
>
> That is ridiculous -- you picked two individuals who had differing
> opinions and say that this proves that over-generalization is good?
All I'm saying is that when an article comes out recognizing a trend
that I can also see in my interactions with a few (more than just the
two, but a few) people it makes me think that maybe I'm seeing the tip
of an iceburg.
>...
> Balkanization is more of a danger in semantic web, in my opinion, since
> there is a lot more room for individual metadata communities to form and
> thrive before they end up having to interoperate.
According to my (limited) understanding of RDF, third-parties can assert
that my X and your Y are the same.
> ... And it is harder for
> a few large vendors to ever have significant enough control over all of
> the metadata publishing and consumption pieces to be able to force some
> level of sameness from the start. So I think semantic web will require
> *more* vigilance and work than RPC to maintain openness.
"Ontological communities are a fact of life and
in fact, one way to deduce that some person or
thing is a member of a reference group is to
check the vocabulary usage."
C. L. Bullard
Big companies cannot standardize that out of existence. It is a fact of
the universe, of humanity. RPC can make a thin layer of standardization
which then gives rise to the same ontological mess at the next level
(okay, I got your business document through an RPC call. Now what?). I
assert without evidence that addresses, hyperlinks and metadata are part
of the solution...that they can be a unifying force. As long as the RPC
world has no equivalent then it has no such unifying force. I suspect
that it will eventually fall back on the Semantic Web to clean it up.
Paul Prescod